How to Build: A Rain Barrel

Are you interested in harvesting

rain

water and want an easy do-it-yourself method? This video will describe how to adapt a 50 gallon drum to a

rain

barrel

for roof draining. The Snohomish Conservation District has been offering workshops with interest from rural and urban homeowners. about why rainwater harvesting is important and how to do it. Rainwater harvesting is a valuable way to reduce the impact that stormwater runoff has on your own property, as well as our local waterways. Many of us have drainage problems at home from wet basements to flooded lawns. A rain

barrel

helps slow roof runoff and direct the overflow to parts of the landscape that can absorb it.

This also reduces the amount of stormwater runoff that is negatively impacting our local water bodies. A rain barrel can also provide an inexpensive source of water. High quality water, perfect for watering the garden during our dry summers and a home improvement project that will really make a difference. These are the tools and parts you will need for this project. They will be explained later in the video and you can also print them. from our website, this is the rain barrel site before any construction has been done. This is approximately where we are going to place the barrel.

We have a downspout here. We're going to run the downspout along this wall and drop it. straight down into the barrel, this is a food grade 55 gon barrel, um, a little anatomy of the barrel, there are two plugs here at the top of the barrel, each with caps and then a rim, um, around All of these plugs are recessed a bit, which will be important later in the

build

. It should be noted that this barrel must be used specifically for this installation. There are many other different types of barrels, but if you are going to use them. our setup needs to use this type of barrel.

We're also going to put an overflow hole here on the side of the barrel and then an outlet hole here on the bottom that we'll connect our watering hose to. Here we have a hardened platform that we made to place the rain barrel on. This serves a couple of purposes: It raises the elevation of the barrel to make it easier to access the faucet we are going to place in the bottom of the rain barrel. The barrel also raises the elevation so we have a little more pressure through the hose. The higher you lift the barrel, the more pressure you have to water the surrounding garden.

It serves as a hard platform to maintain. the barrel sinks from one side to the other and it is also important that it is as level as possible so that it does not receive more weight of the water on one side of the barrel and cause it to tip over, you can make these from any type of material, bricks like that we have here or slabs or cinder blocks or you know, the round shape of a tree, as long as you get the elevation up to the level and the hardness, now we're going to drill. the holes for our barrel, we're going to drill three holes, we're going to drill one of the plugs at the top, we're going to drill a hole in the side for an overflow and we're going to drill a hole in the bottom for the outlet.

I generally like to use a corded drill when I do this. Battery drills work well, but they don't have as consistent torque or power, and this bit I have here is a 4 inch Hol saw has a pilot bit at the end that will go in first to prevent the blade from wobbling all over the place and then this is the hole saw, you have to be very careful with this hole The saw is very sharp, it tends to bend when you start drilling, so you need someone strong and preferably experienced with this type of hole saws when you are drilling your BUN and then I'm going to switch to a 7/8 inch Spade Bit to make the grips on the side and bottom.

When we're drilling the plug, we're going to make sure that our pilot bit here goes right in the center of this cap and then just drill a little bit to secure it, make sure the pilot bits don't come out, and then get ready to drill the actual hole of 4 inches, okay, here is the plug that has been drilled, this is going to be the inlet hole for our rain barrel, so the spout is going to come down and discharge directly into this hole and then the water will go into the barrel. You will notice that this hole is located in a small depression at the top of the barrel, this is a good thing, that means that water will enter this depression and then drip into the rain barrel instead of pooling around the surface of the barrel, all water must go directly into the rain. barrel, so it shouldn't accumulate too much on top.

This is a piece of 6 inch gutter screen. It's just a rigid wire gutter screen that you can buy at most hardware stores. We're going to place it over the hole and I'll screw it down using six screws and washers, this will act as a filter for larger debris, so the leaf needles coming out of your D spout will be collected here instead of going into your barrel where They can clog everything to screw. On the gutter screen, we will use a #6/inch sheet metal screw and a 1/8 by 3/4 inch Fender washer. The screw will go directly through the washer and then we will screw it in.

On the channel screen mesh we are now going to switch to a 7/8 inch spade bit and drill the overflow and outlet holes. We were going to drill the overflow hole at a 90° angle. from our entrance so the overflow can go in that direction along the wall and you want to drill this hole as perpendicular to the wall of the barrel as possible and you want to leave about 3 inches from the top of the barrel for where the hole will be drilled , it's going to be important for you to keep the barrel stable while you drill, so you're going to need another person here to help you hold the barrel or straddle it so it doesn't move around much and you have good control while you drill, there's your hole, now we're going to drill the outlet hole that your hose will connect to, uh, you'll be able to water from now on, this is really important, where you drilled your inlet.

I want the inlet hole to be on the opposite side of the keg because otherwise you'll have the spout down here and the wall here, and if you drill it on this side your tap will go right into the wall, you won. I won't be able to use it very well, so it has to be on the opposite side of where the spout will enter. We are going to drill this hole about 2 inches above the bottom of the barrel, which will leave some sediment storage at the bottom, so you don't pump a lot of sediment out of your barrel, you will need to clean your barrel about once a year to remove that sediment that accumulates.

Let's put that hole right there. Now that we've cut both holes, the outlet hole and the overflow hole, we're going to use a 3/4 inch 14 npt uh pipe tap to cut threads into these holes in the plastic of the barrel and then we're going to take our PVC pieces and screw them directly into the barrel. This is a 3/4 inch 14 npt pipe tap. We're going to use this to cut threads into the holes we made in the barrel. You can see there are these little teeth and then you put it in the hole and as you turn it it cuts threads in the plastic of the barrel that we can screw the PVC pieces directly into, you need a wrench to do this and basically we're just going to put this directly into the bore like this and then screw all the way down until the threads have been cut into the barrel while tapping this it is very important that the tap goes in as straight as possible so it needs to be perpendicular to the barrel and be bolted directly to the barrel.

Usually the best thing to do is start with your hand and then look at it from time to time and make sure you're going straight. and then when you have a good bite of the teeth move to your wrench and use the wrench to screw it all the way into the barrel, you want to make sure you get all the way to the end of the CU threads which will make your cuts nice and clean. If you only go halfway, it's usually very difficult to get the fittings to fit into the barrel, so I'm going to keep screwing and I'm almost all the way down, just don't do it.

Don't screw on too much because then you'll end up with your pipe tap inside your keg so it's probably good right there and then you just loosen it and you can SC unscrew the rest with your hand and then if you look inside and you'll see pipe threads nice, clean ones that you can use the screw on for your PVC fittings and there you have nice, clean threads cut into that 7/8 inch hole. This is the set for your overflow. It has a 3/4 inch PVC. a male threaded elbow female threaded the threaded end will go directly into the overflow hole on your barrel and then on the female end we're going to attach a tube to hose adapter this is a tube to hose adapter uh these are the accessory tubes, this is You will screw into your 90° elbow and then place your hose here for your overflow.

Pipe threads are different than hose threads, so you need to make sure you have one of these, otherwise you'll win. You're not going to be able to connect your hose to your keg, so you're going to take your 90° elbow and your adapter and you're going to take the pipe fittings from the adapter and you're going to screw it into the female and it's going to look like this, that's what overflows. What the assembly will look like, so you take some silicone and just apply a couple drops to the threads over the 90° elbow like this, then we're going to screw the male end of our elbow directly into our overflow hole like this.

You can also take some silicone and place it around the edges and then connect the hose directly to this and place it where you want the overflow to go. You're going to pass the hose. to the side and then to the overflow location, this will be your hose outlet assembly, it has a 2 inch PVC nipple, schedule 8, a ball valve, 3/4 inch ball valve, this is the valve ball valve currently in the on position and you can see how I turn it 90° and it turns off and there is a tube to hose adapter, the nipple will go directly to the bottom of the barrel and then the ball valve will attach to the nipple, take a bit of silicone again and rub it around. around the edge of your nipple and then screw it into your rain barrel now that we have your barrel finished we're just going to take it and place it on your deck make sure you place it so that it's level and that the overflow is going in the direction you want and the hose outlet will be located where you want.

We're going to put the downspout here, so we're just going to run it along the wall and then right to the entrance here and here. we have the final product we have the barrel in place we have brought the downspout and it goes directly to our inlet of our barrel does it make sense that the Sish Conservation District often holds workshops to

build

your own rain barrels if you are considering? a larger system, check out our other videos on how to connect rain barrels and a rainwater system for more information, visit Betterr Ground.org